NOTES FROM A RIVER RAT – Don't fence me in

There isn't a day goes by that I'm not thankful for this piece of property where we live along the Little Shasta River south of Montague.

Stephen Reynolds

There isn't a day goes by that I'm not thankful for this piece of property where we live along the Little Shasta River south of Montague. Nice view all around with abundant wildlife – deer, waterfowl, upland game birds, and a few foxes, coyotes and bobcats to help balance things.

Owning the land is an interesting concept. By law we must have title from whichever government currently controls it – whether or not that government bought it, stole it, traded for it or went to war to get it. It's seldom anyone has been able to hang on to their homeland just because they were the original residents.

Russia thought, I suppose, that the few million dollars they got from us for Alaska was a fair trade in 1867. They probably knew we were about to take it from them anyway, a bit like when the Russians took it away from the Aleuts, Inuit, Tlingits, Haidas and Athabascans. So, Russia likely got off easy. The Sioux and Cheyenne didn't get off easy when we broke our original 1868 treaty with them for their sacred Black Hills, and replaced it with a treaty more suitable to us after gold was discovered on George Custer's "expedition" in 1874 (though Custer didn't get off too easy himself a couple of years later).

If a government wants the land, it's going to take it by flex of muscle or flame of gun. Ask those old-time ranchers – 126 families of them – down in the Oscuro and San Andreas Mountains along the Tularosa Basin and Joranado Del Muerte of south-central New Mexico who were told to get off their lands lock, stock and barrel to make way for a military bombing range back in the 1940s. But I'm getting a little off track here.

This acreage we bought near Montague might not have been worth a whole lot to the native folks who once lived around here. It was part of the rest of the country; it all went together – a place for hunting, trapping, fishing and even some plant harvesting, I suppose. The natives must have thought it strange that a government could move in and start giving away pieces of the earth to people from somewhere else, little pieces which alone didn't mean anything, nor were they worth much that way – what could people do with those pieces without the rest of the surrounding land being connected? If you were confined to a single, little space, how could you live? What did it mean to own a small plot of land when the whole country was there for all the people and wildlife to use? When the elk moved into the high country in the summer the people could move with them; it was cooler up there anyway.

They found out soon enough what the plan was. It didn't include a lot of freedom of movement, nor did it include them.

Whether we like what happened with the native folks or not isn't where I'm going here. This sort of thing has happened since the beginning. But I'm thinking the government was wise, at least, in setting some of this country back for the whole of its citizens to share; otherwise, where could we go now for recreation? We'd be climbing through fences everywhere, and being arrested for trespass, just because we wanted to do a little hunting or fishing or picnicking with the family.

Owning the land is an inclination that's natural to us – This place is mine ... stay the hell out! We would be in more wars than we are now, big and small, if we didn't have some way of legalizing the possession of land. But it's still a strange concept.

We're so accustomed to seeing maps with lines delineating ownership that one of the astronauts said that the strangest thing to him, while viewing the earth from outer space, was there were no lines on the continents. The world he saw looked alien from anything he had seen on paper, like looking a long way back in time.

Indeed, it would be interesting if there were no lines, real or imaginary, and with no names given to the areas the lines enclose, or license plates telling everyone where we were from. But then, how could they tell us Northern Californians from those slippery Southern Oregonians? Maybe the way we drive?

– Stephen Reynolds is retired and living on some stolen land along the Little Shasta River.

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